A word, however, in the first place about the original meaning of the word _lustratio_. _Lustrare_ is a strong form of _luere_: and _luere_ is explained by Varro as equivalent to _solvere_ (De Ling. Lat. vi. 11): ‘Lustrum nominatum tempus quinquennale a luendo, id est solvendo; quod quinto quoque anno vectigalia et ultro tributa per censores persolvebantur.’ He is followed by Servius, who explains such expressions as ‘paena commissa luere’, ‘peccata luere’, ‘supplicium luere’,[118] on the same principle. We might, therefore, be tempted to think that the root-meaning of _lustrare_ is to perform a duty or an obligation, and so to rid oneself of it--to go through a religious rite as due to a deity. But this would be to misconceive the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained _luere_ by reference to the payment of taxes. We have not yet arrived at a period in Roman thought when we can speak of a sense of religious duty: it is not a money obligation or a ritualistic one that has to be got ‘rid of’, in the earliest ages of the Latin farm or City-State, but those ubiquitous spirits, presumably hostile until they are reclaimed, which haunt the life of man in the animistic stage. Varro and his successors do, however, give us the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of purging yourself or getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man’s intelligence, but of the relation of man to man in a civilized state. If, then, _lustrare_ originally embodies this sense of ridding oneself of something, we can now go on to examine the oldest forms of _lustratio_. I will not here go into the further question whether _lues_, a pest, and the shadowy deity _Lua_ Mater, who was the consort or companion in some antique sense of Saturnus, are words belonging to the same group and explicable on the same principle.